In 1993 Dominick Dunne was already famous for saying “he did it” whenever it came to a high-profile murder case he reported on for Vanity Fair. He almost always sided with the prosecution against the defendant, and he did so with the same unbridled partiality he honed a decade earlier when, making his debut in Vanity Fair, he covered the trial of John Sweeney, the Ma Maison chef who strangled to death Dunne’s 22-year-old actress-daughter, Dominique.

Erik and Lyle Menendez were on trial for double murder in 1993. The two young men and their two middle-aged victims were not celebrities, but they were wealthy, lived in Beverly Hills, and had ties to the movie business. Even more newsworthy: The victims were Erik and Lyle’s parents, Kitty and Jose Menendez, a top executive at Live Entertainment. The brothers loaded and reloaded their 12-gauge Mossberg shotguns 14 times in the TV room of the family mansion at 722 North Elm Drive.

There was no doubt that Erik and Lyle had murdered their parents on August 20, 1989, as the couple sat watching “The Spy Who Loved Me” on the VCR. The big question of the sensational Menendez trial was whether the father had sexually abused his sons. Dunne said he believed without a doubt that Jose never molested them. He said it before the trial began, and he said it 12 years later when interviewed for a documentary based on his life. “I never ever believed for a second that he sexually abused them,” he told the camera.

Actually, Dunne did believe the two son’s accusations against Jose Menendez, and he believed it for more than a second. He believed it for the better part of a day. September 11, 1993, was Lyle Menendez’s first day on the stand in his own defense. Defense attorney Jill Lansing questioned him on the stand, “Why did you kill your parents?”

According to Lyle, Jose Menendez thought of their sex together as a male bonding ritual. Lyle was only six years old when first raped, and said being anally penetrated made him feel he was “the most important thing” in his father’s life.

The most heartbreaking moment in his testimony, however, came later when Lyle talked about his younger brother. He revealed his father also raped Erik, and that he, in turn, replicated that sexual abuse by taking his kid brother into the woods to molest him there in a similar matter. In the courtroom, Lyle looked away from his lawyer, and leaning forward on the stand, he faced Erik to apologize, “I don’t understand why, and I’m sorry!”

Erik and Lyle were not the only ones crying. Several jurors and reporters also wept. Ashen, Dominick Dunne shook his head. “I wonder if I’m wrong. Could I be wrong?” he asked Shoreen Maghame, a young reporter from the City News Service.

Out in the courthouse hallway, Dunne repeated his “I wonder if I’m wrong” statement to another reporter, and added, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I believe this. I think he’s telling the truth.”

Unlike Shoreen Maghame, Playboy reporter Robert Rand agreed with the man from Vanity Fair about almost nothing that happened during the Menendez trial. In fact, Court TV had hired Dunne and Rand to disagree, and late every Friday afternoon throughout the trial the two journalists gave opposing weekly rebuttals on camera. Crime watchers had never seen anything like it. The Menendez trial was only the second one for which the cable network presented gavel-to-gavel coverage, the first being the ten-day Williams Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991. On Court TV during the months-long Menendez trial, it was Robert Rand for the defense and Dominick Dunne for the prosecution.

In the hallway, Dunne repeated himself a third time, “I may be wrong.”

The Menendez trial represented everything Dunne loathed about the criminal justice system. It was all about a couple of wealthy brats using their money to buy themselves justice and, in the process, ruin the good reputations of their victims. Dominick saw the same thing happen to his own daughter, Dominique. The defense raised unsubstantiated charges of abortion and drug use against her, and then, in Dunne’s opinion, the killer got his rich boss to pay for his defense.

The Menendez trial also proved personally complicated for Dunne. Like Jose Menendez, he, too, had raised two sons in the rarefied hot-house environment of money, privilege, and celebrity that is Beverly Hills. Even more disturbing, Dunne found he strongly identified with one of the young killers and confessed, years later, of being “fascinated” by Erik Menendez.

Erik was the handsome son, the likable one. He overcame a severe childhood stammer, as did Dunne; and much more significant, Dunne believed Erik to be “homosexual.” In the private journals he kept as an adult, Dunne wrote of not understanding the “equation between” the young heiresses he dated in his hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut, and the adult men he met in the town’s public restrooms, but that he pursued them with “the same fervor.” He claimed to have been only “nine or ten” when he first began performing acts of oral sex on men in the local park.

Then there were the beatings he received from his father, Dr. Richard Dunne.

The Menendez trial compelled Dunne, for the first time in his life, to write and publicly talk about the physical abuse he experienced as a child at the hands of his own father. He linked that abuse to what happened to the younger Menendez son. Dunne never publicly revealed the other thing that drew him to Erik: their sexual orientation. While he believed that Jose Menendez called Erik a “faggot,” Dunne would only say that his own father had called him a “sissy.”

The word “sissy” in the guarded 1930s of Dunne’s boyhood had been replaced by “faggot” in the less circumspect times of Erik’s youth. “He mimicked me,” Dominick said of his own father. “He called me a sissy. ‘Sissy’ is a tough word. It may not sound tough, but it’s words that hurt. It lingers.”

The word “sissy” fastened itself to Dunne’s consciousness because it labeled his greatest fear about himself. He was not a real boy. He was a girl trapped in a boy’s body.

Dr. Dunne was not the only one who said it. An uncle told Richard that the 6-year-old Nicky Dunne “ought to have been a girl.” A friendly Italian barber told his mother, Dorothy Dunne, the same thing: “He ought to have been a girl.” What remained burned in Dominick Dunne’s memory is that neither parent disagreed with that opinion; no one came to his “rescue” to claim the real little boy within. “I never felt I belonged anywhere, even in my own family. I was the outsider of the six kids,” he said.

Dunne’s deeply instilled homophobia regarding his own sexual orientation influenced and played into his coverage of the Menendez trial.

“There was a strain of homosexuality running through the trial,” said the prosecutor, Pamela Bozanich, whom Dunne quickly befriended. “We knew Erik was gay and having oral sex with the inmates.” They also knew of homoerotic photographs taken of Erik. In addition, Dunne liked to gossip about Erik’s possible physical attraction to his high school friend Craig Cignarelli, a witness for the prosecution. Dunne and Bozanich even speculated on why Judge Weisberg often disallowed the word “homosexual” in the courtroom.

According to Bozanich, defense attorney Leslie Abramson was “panicked that people would find out or think Erik was homosexual. We had this strain all through the trail and Dominick would whisper things people told him.”

And it didn’t stop there. Early one morning, Bozanich awoke to a frantic phone call. It was Dominick Dunne. He heard he was going to be outed if he did not stop writing about the Menendez trial. Bozanich had to wonder, “Why is he telling me this at six o’clock in the morning?”

ABC News’s Dan Abrams recalled the hubbub. “It was really a very, very gossipy case,” said the legal analyst. “There’s no question when it came to the trial gossip Dominick was the leader among the reporters there. He was hearing everything. Some of it wasn’t true.”

One tidbit that turned out to be true, and which Dunne uncovered through his reporting, was a homoerotic photograph taken of Erik Menendez. A detective gave him the tip to contact the photographer Philip Kearney.

“Dominick was very apologetic when he first phoned me,” Kearney recalled. “He was very respectful.” Which did not stop Dunne from asking if the photographer had an intimate relationship with Erik. In Vanity Fair, Dominick recorded Kearney’s response as being “Spiritually, yes. Physically, almost.”

Nearly a decade and a half after that interview, Kearney said the relationship was actually “more physical than it was spiritual. I’d give Erik a massage and it would lead to other things.”

Erik always claimed not to be homosexual but told the photographer, “If I was gay, Craig [Cignarelli] would be my boyfriend.”

“The statement is nonsensical, but I didn’t challenge it,” said Kearney.

One day, Erik gave Kearney a screenplay he had written, about a teenager who kills his parents to collect the insurance money. Kearney did not read it but knew the general outline from what Erik told him. “It’s horrible enough reading your own stuff,” Kearney surmised. “And I shelved it.”

In Dunne’s conversations with Kearney, he focused not on the script that presaged the double murders but rather the photographs. In his testimony Erik claimed that his father forced him to pose naked over an oval mirror to obtain a more dramatic view of his naked torso. Dunne rejected that story. He believed Erik got the idea of the mirror from one of Kearney’s photo sessions, and it was this photo that Dominick insisted illustrate his Vanity Fair article.

Dunne and Kearney also discussed at length the fateful day that Erik showed up not in the usual sports car but an old clunker. Kearney never knew for sure if Jose Menendez had molested his sons. “What I do know is the father cut them off. He cut them off where it hurt the most in Beverly Hills,” Kearney said of money, cars, and clothes. “And that’s where it was all trailing from. The car wasn’t in a shop. The father had taken it away from him.”

According to Kearney, Dominick always believed that Lyle masterminded the murders, and “Erik wasn’t strong enough to defy that hook Lyle had in him.”

The first Menendez trial ended in two hung juries. Dominick Dunne, however, did not cover the second trial, which resulted in two murder convictions. By then, the Vanity Fair writer was engulfed in the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Not that he ever forgot Erik Menendez.

In 2001, Dunne wrote a letter to Erik to request a face-to-face interview in prison. He had read Erik’s many unproduced screenplays, written before the two sons committed murder, and in the letter he went on to lavish praise on the young man’s talent as a writer. “How often you come to my mind,” Dunne wrote.

His fascination didn’t stop there. He also made copies of Kearney’s shirtless photograph of Erik, and on special occasions, Dunne would show the photo to guests at his country house in Hadlyme, Connecticut.

#BuryYourGays: 27 LGBT TV Characters Killed Off in 2016, From 'Empire' to 'Game of Thrones' (Photos)

Gay and lesbian characters had a seriously high mortality rate on the small screen this year.

Denise Cloyd (Merritt Wever), "The Walking Dead"

A medic for the Alexandria Safe-Zone, she planted a kiss on Tara’s lips at one point. But she becomes the first victim of Negan’s group when he seeks retaliation for the Alexandria assault. Because on TV, LGBT characters seem to always die first.

AMC

Loras Tyrell (Finn Jones), "Game of Thrones"

Imprisoned by the Faith Militant for buggery, Loras winds up dying -- along with his sister, Margaery, when Cercei blows up the Great Sept with a dragon-fire bomb.

HBO

Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), "Orange Is the New Black"

A former Army brat who first fell for a German commander’s daughter when her father was stationed overseas, Poussey is accidentally suffocated by rookie correctional officer Baxter Bayley during a demonstration in the Litchfield prison cafeteria.

Netflix

Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), "The 100"

The commander of the 12 Clans, who sparks a relationship with Clarke (Eliza Taylor), dies after being accidentally shot in the stomach by rival Titus.

The CW

Edward Meechum (Nathan Darrow), "House of Cards"

Frank Underwood’s bodyguard was promoted to Secret Service when he became president, had a three-way with first couple Frank (Kevin Spacey) and Claire (Robin Wright) and died taking a bullet for the president.

Netflix

Bethany Mayfair (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), "Blindspot"

The assistant director of the FBI’s New York office was fatally shot by Oscar while confronting tatted heroine Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) about who had framed her for murder. If you're going to kill off a series regular, make sure it's the lesbian.

NBC

Root (Amy Acker), "Person of Interest"

A computer hacker in love with former Army intelligence operative Sameen (Sarah Shahi), Root winds up taking a sniper’s bullet intended for Finch (Michael Emerson). And thus ended a character who'd been on the show since season 1 (and in more episodes than any other woman).

CBS

Donnie (Michael Esper), "Shades of Blue"

A NYPD internal affairs lieutenant -- and ex of Ray Liotta's crooked precinct commander -- was killed by another cop apparently in self-defense.

This (secretly) married couple schemed to oust Lucious from control off Empire Entertainment but then turned on each other, with Camilla killing Mimi and then herself (after Lucious tried to blackmail her by catching the murder on videotape).

Fox

Jack Downey (Tanner Buchanan), "The Fosters"

An awkward bespectacled foster teen who befriends Callie and Jude -- and shares a kiss with Jude -- before his foster dad murders him. Because of course he does.

Freeform

Charlotte DeLaurentis (Vanessa Ray), "Pretty Little Liars"

Charlotte, revealed to be a transgender villain for much of the show, dies mysteriously in a fall from a bell tower -- only hours after being released from a mental hospital to the care of her sister. As with all things "PLL," though, there's a chance she's not really dead.

Freeform

Sara Harvey (Dre Davis), "Pretty Little Liars"

Sara, a love interest of jock Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), became the third LGBT character to die on the series -- this time in the shower, to an as-yet unidentified assailant.

Freeform

Thomas Abigail (Dougray Scott), "Fear the Walking Dead"

No sooner does Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) reunite with his boyfriend after the zombie apocalypse separates them than he learns that Thomas has been bitten. Thomas soon dies and Victor shoots him in the head.

Pamela and Ella, the mayor and councilwoman of the town of Cypress, are having an illicit affair -- which leads to the murder of Ella's husband. The killer turns out to be Pamela's husband, who mistakenly thought his wife was having an affair with the deceased -- and then shoots both Pamela and Ella when he learns the truth. Killing two lesbians with one stone.

Bounce

Gina (Emmanuelle Chriqui), "Shut Eye"

First, husband-wife psychic entrepreneurs Charlie and Linda try to hire hypnotist Gina, then they torture her, then Linda sleeps with Gina. And then Gina gets murdered by the series villain. Which is modern TV's version of comeuppance.

Hulu

Edward Philippe Mott (Evan Peters), "American Horror Story: Roanoke"

Edward, the gay aristocratic owner of a mansion in 18th-century Roanoke, N.C., meets a mysterious and violent end at the hands of colonial spirits.

FX

Helen (Sarah Silverman), "Masters of Sex"

Helen dies in childbirth -- and worse, her parents deny any parental rights to her longtime girlfriend, Betty (Annaleigh Ashford). A typically '50s unhappy ending -- though at least she isn't murdered.

Showtime

Susan Jackson (Hilary Jardine), "Van Helsing"

A bisexual former vampire who cuddles up with vampire-hunting lead Vanessa Van Helsing (Kelly Overton) but ultimately is strangled to death by a serial killer.

Freeform's one-season mystery drama about three young women sharing a London flat had a doozy of a finale. We learn that two of the roommates (Roz and Molly) were secretly having an affair, that a jealous Roz hired the third roommate's boyfriend to kill Molly and that the third roommate kills Roz when this all comes to light.

Major Corky Lance Corcoran (Tom Hollander), "The Night Manager"

A henchman of a wealthy but secretive arms dealer, the fey Corky is beaten to death by British intelligence recruit Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) to prevent his exposure.

AMC

Felicity (Shivani Ghai), "The Catch"

Felicity is introduced as the bisexual girlfriend of Sonya Walger's con artist character, Margot -- but is shot dead by Margot's own brother after he learns Felicity has slept with both siblings.

ABC

Bridey Cruz (Floriana Lima), "The Family"

The lesbian lifestyle blogger gets offed after getting a little too close to uncovering the ABC drama's central mystery -- but the culprit was intended to be revealed in a second season that will now never happen. Signs point to her lover, Willa (Allison Pill), who managed her mom's campaign for governor of Maine.

ABC

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Gay and lesbian characters had a seriously high mortality rate on the small screen this year (spoilers ahead!)

Gay and lesbian characters had a seriously high mortality rate on the small screen this year.

HOLLYBLOGS

Robert Hofler has worked as an editor at Life, Us Weekly and Variety. His books include "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson," "Party Animals," and "Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange, How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos." His latest book, "Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne," was published in spring 2017.